Hold Congress Accountable

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In a recent subcommittee hearing with appropriations committee, Dr. Thomas Frieden, the director of the CDC, testified to several representatives regarding the budgetary affairs of the CDC. Throughout the hearing, Dr. Frieden talked at length about the various projects the CDC had been involved with recently, particularly regarding the Zika and Ebola viruses.

Reasserting lost Congressional authority has been a major theme this year, with the creation of the Article I Project and a House task force on executive overreach. Many legislators have taken charge in curbing the waste and latency plaguing the federal government, and Rep. Cathy McMorris-Rodgers (R-WA-5) is the latest to join the fight for such accountability.

The Federal Bureau of Prisons is coming under some scrutiny from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.). The two Kentucky Republicans recently introduced the Federal Prisons Accountability Act, S. 1784, which would require the president to appoint the director of the agency and subject the nominee to Senate confirmation under Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution.

The House is getting set to pass the 21st Century Cures Act (H.R. 6). The bill has good intentions. It is trying to do great things by reforming the patent process to streamline the research and production of drugs - getting them to patients faster, which will save lives. Unfortunately, the bill also creates a new spending program with some dubious offsets that make the overall bill difficult for conservatives to support.

President Obama released his latest budget, a plan that would spend $4 trillion next year and $50 trillion over the next decade. The plan is packed with goodies from free community college to free preschool to increased infrastructure spending. The budget blows past the spending caps that Obama signed into law in 2011.

Now that we're a little more than a week on from the government shutdown's start, Americans are a beginning to feel the effects of not having a bureaucratic nightmare breathing down their necks as they make all of their major life decisions. Can the governent breathe down our necks while the website that powers the government's own health care plan is still non-functional? Unfortunately, it can.

On today’s edition of the FreedomCast, Lachlan Markay joins me to discuss the shutdown theater: the selective closing of national monuments and park grounds, and why some websites such as Michelle Obama’s “Drink Up” campaign site were deemed essential during this partial shutdown, but others were not.

America deserves a strong leader during the government shutdown, not one who merely allows us to stumble along, doing whatever we want in the middle of the greatest crisis of all time. President Obama should take the threat to his credibility seriously, and not allow Americans to lose sight of the central role of government in their lives.